I own a generic laptop so it doesn’t have a manufacture tech support. (It’s basically a custom made laptop if you want to call it that). I had it for about 2 years now give or take.
I don’t know if it was exactly the hard drive, but I assume it is. I heard two really light metal ticks. It sounded like when you snag your clothe onto a relatively small, thin metal and it produces that small ticking sound. Or when you open up some electronic and on the lid there’s metal and you flick the metal; it made a sound somewhat like that. I don’t know how to describe it.
It ticked twice, stopped for like a 30 seconds to a minute and then ticked twice again. I shut down like 3 minutes after the second tick, cleaned the fan and let it rest for 10 minutes and turned it back on. So far, I can’t reproduce the same clicking and nothing different happened.
Because this is generic laptop, finding a replacement hard drive would be somewhat hard.